Method to detect a gist change

No abstrac

Silent reading as determined by age and visual acuity

In this study silent reading by adults ranging in age from 35 to 90 years was investigated. The texts to be read were printed in black on white paper with character sizes varying from 1–9 mm x-height (visual angle 0.19° to 1.67°). In order to separate age effects from visual-acuity effects, subjects with different levels of visual acuity (0.1–2.5 decimal acuity) participated in the experiment. Silent reading rate was employed as the dependent variable. Visual acuity affected reading rate most, followed by letter size. In normal-acuity subjects the variance in reading rates decreased as a function of age. Reading rates initially increased rapidly with increasing letter size, but after reaching an optimum gradually declined again as letters became larger. For the different acuity classes there appeared to be clearly optimal letter sizes, varying from 1.9 for the highest acuity group to 6 mm for the lowest acuity group at the 33 cm reading distance employed. However, the optimal reading rates of visually impaired subjects found in this study remained below those of individuals with normal acuity. This suggests that visual impairment is a more general neural phenomenon rather than merely a deficient optical image. The obtained reading-rate data could be accurately described by a theoretical model encompassing a decoding process and an integration process. It appeared that the model predictions were entirely determined by the smallest letter size at which reading is just possible with a specified visual acuity. It is concluded that both decoding and integration are dependent on visual acuity and that, in the absence of specific visual defects, ageing effects in reading can be completely explained by gradual lowering of visual acuity having its origin in central mechanisms

The recognition of attitudes in speech

No abstract

Design and evaluation of interactive instruction as communicative dialogue

Throughout history hearing people have been puzzled about the difficulty to communicate with deafpeople; a puzzlementperhaps strengthened by the fact that hearing is only one of the human sensory faculties. Apparently loss of hearing affects human communication far more than any other sensory impairment. On analyzing the communication process in more detail one finds that it is made possible by a large numberofconditions thatall have to be satisfied in order to proceed successfully. It appears to be inherently uncertain, it requires a great deal of redundancy, and makes use of an, often implicit, protocol. On closer analysis it turns out that the process of manual signing embodies the same communicative principles as spoken communication; even if a number of features are different as a consequence of the visual display. Inasmuch as the development of sign language seems to parallel that of spoken language in many ways, sign language qualifies undoubt­edly as a language in its own right. Interactive instruction can be considered to be a special kind ofcommunication with dialogue rules that are in many ways different from those in other types of person-to-person communication. Some ofthese are beneficia! for interactive instructional systems, but a persistent problem is still how to obtain informative feedback, and how to deal with it in the ongoing interaction. One example is the question of how to provide spoken instances ofletters in words, or words in a text for hearing impaired ordeaf children when they try learning to rcad. Alphabetic script has many problems for those who do not have the same audible representation of language as hearing people. Current insight in communication processes suggests that one should abstain from strong statements on education for deaf people and concen­trate instead on evaluation of the intelligibility and comprehensibility of the instructional dialogue